Maggie Astor

Ryan’s exit leaves 18 Democrats in the 2020 race.

“I wanted to give voice to the forgotten communities that have been left behind by globalization and automation, and I’m proud of this campaign because I believe we’ve done that,” Ryan said in a video announcing his withdrawal. “While it didn’t work out quite the way we planned, this voice will not be stifled.”

He said he would run for reelection to his House seat.

Competing in an overflowing field, Ryan — previously known mostly for challenging Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the House Democratic leadership — never really got a foothold. He qualified for the first two debates in June and July with a handful of 1% polling results, but never came close to reaching the higher thresholds that followed.

When he entered the race in April, he argued that he could win back the white, working-class Midwesterners who had flipped from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. His House district includes Youngstown and part of Akron, a stretch of northeastern Ohio long reliant on the auto industry, and his platform focused on the damage caused by the decline of traditional manufacturing.

One of his central proposals was a large federal investment in renewable energy industries, including electric vehicle construction, to create jobs in the places most affected by that decline.

“I’m in a place to really bridge that economic disorientation,” he said in an interview the day he announced his candidacy. “I want a businessperson in Michigan to say, ‘I think Tim Ryan really understands what we need to do around electric vehicles,’ and I want a worker in Michigan going, ‘Yeah, we just lost our job, let’s make electric — that seems like it’s the future.’”

He also argued that food and agricultural policy connected a range of disparate issues, including health care costs and climate change. He proposed shifting federal funding from large agribusinesses to local and organic farms, and creating tax credits and grants for grocers and other businesses that served so-called food deserts, areas where healthy food is unavailable or unaffordable.

After the mass shooting in August in Dayton, Ohio, Ryan spoke forcefully in favor of gun control, telling CNN that Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, needed to “get off his ass and do something.” With the advocacy group Moms Demand Action, he led a “caravan” from Ohio to Louisville, Kentucky, where McConnell lives.

Guns were one of a handful of issues — abortion was another — on which Ryan notably evolved during his House tenure. He once had an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association, but donated the money he had received from its political action committee to gun control groups after the Las Vegas shooting in 2017.

But his central message was always about the economy.

Ryan described the decline of traditional manufacturing not only as the focus of his campaign, but also as its impetus. He often recounted his daughter calling him in tears after a friend’s father lost his job at General Motors and saying, “You have to do something.”

So, he liked to say, he did something: He ran for president.

This article originally appeared in

Tim Ryan Ends His 2020 Presidential Campaign

Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio dropped out of the presidential race Thursday, ending a campaign that sought to champion Midwestern manufacturing workers but failed to gain traction.

The lawyer, Steve Patton, gave $5,600 — the legal maximum contribution — to Buttigieg in June and was scheduled to co-host a fundraiser for him Friday. After The Associated Press reported on Patton’s involvement, Buttigieg’s campaign said that it would return the money and that Patton would not attend the fundraiser.

“Transparency and justice for Laquan McDonald is more important than a campaign contribution,” a campaign spokesman, Chris Meagher, said in a statement. “We are returning the money he contributed to the campaign and the money he has collected. He is no longer a co-host for the event and will not be attending.”

Race has long been a political liability for Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who has struggled all year to gain support among black voters, a crucial Democratic constituency. In a national Quinnipiac poll released Monday, he was at 11% among white voters but only 1% among black voters.

This Sunday, it will be five years since a white police officer, Jason Van Dyke, killed Laquan, who was 17. Van Dyke, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to about seven years in prison, shot him 16 times.

Chicago officials refused to turn over dashboard video of the killing until a judge ordered them to do so in November 2015, and Patton, then the city’s top lawyer, was a leader in the effort to block the footage’s release.

The video — which contradicted police accounts of the killing — showed Laquan stepping away from Van Dyke, who began firing anyway and continued to fire even after Laquan was lying on the ground.

The fundraiser with Patton threatened to draw attention away from Buttigieg’s performance in Tuesday’s debate, which was generally well-received, and back to Buttigieg’s record on race.

Early in his tenure as mayor, Buttigieg fired South Bend’s black police chief, a decision that still angers many residents. And in June, a white South Bend police officer killed a black man, Eric Logan, setting off a crisis that Buttigieg left the campaign trail to address. At a town-hall event after the killing, the anger was palpable, with one attendee shouting, “We don’t trust you.”

Buttigieg released what he called a “Douglass Plan” for black Americans in July, designed to reduce racial inequities, but it has not measurably increased his standing.

While Buttigieg is polling among the top five candidates in the sprawling Democratic field, his overall numbers have generally hovered around 4% nationally, according to polls taken before the debate. He has raised more money this year than any Democratic presidential candidate except Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Buttigieg Cuts Ties With Donor Linked to Laquan McDonald Cover-Up

Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, facing criticism, distanced itself Friday from a Chicago lawyer who tried to block the release of footage of the 2014 police shooting of a black teenager, Laquan McDonald.

Eight candidates have qualified for the debate so far:

— Former Vice President Joe Biden

— Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey

— Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana

— Sen. Kamala Harris of California

— Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont

— Hedge-fund investor Tom Steyer

— Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts

Yang was the latest to qualify because he received enough support in a Quinnipiac University national poll released Tuesday afternoon. Other candidates have until 11:59 p.m. Nov. 13 to qualify.

While 12 candidates qualified for the fourth debate, scheduled for next week near Columbus, Ohio, the DNC has set higher criteria for the next one. Candidates will need at least 165,000 donors (up from 130,000) and at least 3% support in four polls (up from 2%).

As an alternative to the 3%-in-four-polls requirement, candidates can qualify by registering at least 5% support in two polls conducted in the four early-voting states.

The gradually increasing requirements have steadily culled the field of debaters and, to a lesser extent, the Democratic field as a whole. Twenty candidates qualified for each of the first two debates, when they needed only 65,000 donors or 1% in three polls. But only 10 met the higher requirements for the third debate; two more met them in time for next week’s.

Sanders, who is recovering from a heart attack, is still expected to participate in next week’s debate. On Tuesday morning, before seeing a new cardiologist, he told reporters that he had felt unusually fatigued for the past month or two and that he “should have listened to those symptoms.”

Fifth Democratic Debate Will Be in Georgia, With 8 Candidates So Far

The fifth Democratic debate will be held in the Atlanta area on Nov. 20, the Democratic National Committee announced Tuesday. MSNBC and The Washington Post will host it.

Her announcement means the 19 Democratic presidential candidates unanimously support the inquiry. Gabbard had been the only holdout after the White House released a reconstruction of a July phone call in which Trump urged the president of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.

“Up to this point, I have been opposed to pursuing impeachment because it will further divide our already badly divided country,” Gabbard said in a statement from her congressional office. “However, after looking carefully at the transcript of the conversation with Ukraine’s president, the whistleblower complaint, the inspector general memo and President Trump’s comments about the issue, unfortunately, I believe that if we do not proceed with the inquiry, it will set a very dangerous precedent.”

She added: “If we allow the president to abuse his or her power, then our society will rot from top to bottom. We will turn into a banana republic, where people in positions of power — from the president all the way down to the traffic cop — will feel it’s OK to abuse their power with no consequences.”

As one of two sitting representatives still in the race (the other is Tim Ryan of Ohio), Gabbard will be able to cast a vote if, in fact, articles of impeachment are sent to the House floor.

What effect, if any, impeachment proceedings will have on the presidential race is impossible to say. Gabbard’s previous opposition to impeachment made her a loner in the Democratic field, but that was not unusual: She has stood apart from the rest of the candidates on a variety of issues, especially foreign policy.

The announcement Friday was a remarkable turnaround for Gabbard, who had said just two days ago that she did not think the reconstructed call had shown “compelling cause” for impeachment. In an interview with Hill TV on Wednesday, when asked directly whether the transcript had changed her thinking on impeachment, she said, “It hasn’t.”

“I’m not a lawyer, but I think most people reading through that transcript are not going to find that extremely compelling cause to throw out a president that won an election in 2016,” she said then. “Instead, what I think most people will see is, ‘Hey, this is another move by Democrats to get rid of Donald Trump,’ further deepening the already hyperpartisan divides that we have in this country.”

A spokesman for her office provided the statement Friday but did not immediately respond to a question about what had caused Gabbard to change her mind.

The whistleblower complaint, released Thursday, at the center of the inquiry included new allegations that the White House had tried to cover up the phone call by putting the transcript in a computer system intended for highly classified information.

While the Democratic presidential field is now united in support of the impeachment inquiry that Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Tuesday, the candidates, like the congressional Democratic caucus, are still divided on how extensive the inquiry should be. It is an open question, for example, whether articles of impeachment — if the inquiry leads to them — should focus only on the Ukraine issue or also include past actions by Trump.

Gabbard argued that the inquiry should be “swift, thorough and narrowly focused.”

“It cannot be turned into a long, protracted partisan circus that will further divide our country and undermine our democracy,” she said.

Gabbard is still a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination, consistently polling in the low single digits in voter surveys. But this week, she hit a polling threshold that qualified her for the next debate in October.

Tulsi Gabbard, Last 2020 Holdout, Backs Impeachment Inquiry

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii endorsed the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump on Friday, dropping long-standing opposition that she had affirmed as recently as two days ago.

It is a bitter reality for the candidates who failed to qualify for next month’s debate, and griping has been in plentiful supply. Some argue that the Democratic National Committee’s qualification criteria are arbitrary — candidates must reach 2% support in at least four polls by approved organizations — and that the committee is prematurely culling the field. Others want the DNC to count a wider range of surveys.

But among voters upset that their preferred candidate didn’t make the cut, some objections stem from misunderstandings of how polling works. We talked to pollsters to clear up some points of confusion.

You probably won’t be polled.

As the story goes, George Gallup, a pioneer of modern polling, once told a woman who questioned his sampling methods — nobody she knew had ever been polled, she said — that being selected for a poll was about as likely as being struck by lightning.

It’s true. If a poll has a sample size of 1,000 — and many are smaller — that’s 1,000 people out of millions. Your chances of being chosen for that poll might be less than one-thousandth of a percentage point.

Dozens of polls have been conducted by DNC-approved organizations this year, but one-thousandth of a percentage point multiplied dozens of times is still a fraction of a percentage point. Your chances look marginally better if you count only the voting-age population or registered voters, but not better enough to be meaningful.

So if nobody has ever polled you, that’s not surprising at all.

But that doesn’t make the polls invalid.

Without a statistical background, it can be hard to understand how such a tiny piece of the electorate can represent the whole. But it absolutely can.

“One of the first things that you learn in probability statistics is that the accuracy of your sample is based on the size of the sample itself and not the proportion of the population that it represents,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Imagine you wanted to know how many blades of grass were in your lawn. If you divided the lawn into 10,000 equally sized squares and counted the blades in 500 of those squares, you could extrapolate that number to the whole lawn. If you made 1 million squares, you could still extrapolate by picking 500 of them. The total number of squares on the lawn doesn’t matter; what matters is that you randomly choose 500 of them to sample.

Similarly, the total number of voters in the United States doesn’t matter. What matters is that each voter has an equal chance of being surveyed, even if that chance is infinitesimal.

Sample size does matter, of course, but only to a point. A 500-person sample is much better than a 200-person sample. But there isn’t much difference in accuracy between a 1,000-person sample and a 2,000-person sample, said J. Ann Selzer, president of the Iowa polling firm Selzer &amp; Co.

You can’t volunteer.

Random sampling is an essential part of polling. You can’t conduct a reliable poll with volunteers, because the people who take the initiative to volunteer won’t be representative of the full electorate.

“You can’t invite yourself to the party,” Selzer said, “because the people who would choose to invite themselves to the party may have some existing bias.”

Some pollsters have a database of registered voters and randomly select some of them. Others use random digit dialing, meaning they have a computer generate random phone numbers.

Online organizations like SurveyMonkey and YouGov operate a bit differently: They take samples from the pool of people who fill out their user-generated surveys, so people can put themselves in the running by taking such surveys. But they can’t make themselves be chosen: Within those pools, participants are still selected randomly, and the pools are still very large.

This month, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii — who ended up falling two polls short of qualifying for the September debate — urged her supporters to take SurveyMonkey and YouGov surveys in hopes of being chosen for an official poll. Her supporters appear to have gone a step further: Selzer said they had been calling her office, asking to be included in her polls, which are not conducted online.

There is no way to increase your odds of being chosen for one of Selzer’s polls, which have been among the most accurate in the country in past elections. They would be less reliable if there were.

Good polls are weighted, but only lightly.

Because demographics like race, sex, age and education level are associated with differences in political opinion, polls are more accurate when the demographic breakdown is accurate. If, for example, women or white people or baby boomers are over- or underrepresented in a sample, the poll results are likely to be skewed.

Pollsters address that problem through a process called weighting. If, say, college-educated men account for a larger percentage of the sample than they do of the full electorate, the pollster will count their responses a little less in the results.

In high-quality polls, these adjustments tend to be small, because a properly selected sample will have a close-to-accurate representation of most demographics to begin with. So a reputable organization would take a sample that was 54% women and weight it to match the percentage shown in the census, but a sample that was 75% women would be fatally flawed.

“If your original sample is way off on a certain demographic, no amount of weighting is going to help you,” said Doug Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. But if you choose your sample properly, he added, “you’re not going to be way off on any of the demographics.”

Every poll can’t be accurate. But averages usually are.

Many people are familiar with the margin of sampling error, which reflects the uncertainty involved in taking a sample of a larger population. A margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points means that a candidate’s actual support could easily be as much as three percentage points higher or lower than what the poll says.

That margin is tied to something called a confidence interval. Most polls publish a 95% confidence interval: 5% of the time, that interval won’t contain the truth because of sampling error. That rate also may not capture every possible polling problem, like people not picking up the phone.

“You cannot treat polls as crystal balls no matter how well they are done,” Murray said. “Statistics tell us that polls cannot be accurate 100% of the time.”

But while you shouldn’t put too much faith in a single poll, averages of many polls are pretty reliable.

To qualify for next month’s debate, candidates needed to register 2% support in at least four of the 21 polls that met the DNC’s criteria. A candidate supported by 2% of all Democratic voters very likely got less than that in some polls. But it would be exceedingly unlikely for them not to reach the bar in at least four.

“If you see in poll after poll that a candidate is not getting the 2%,” Schwartz said, “that will give you confidence that they’re really not at that 2%.”

Why You Can't Volunteer for Election Polls, and Other Polling Facts

Election polls have always been interesting. But this year, they have become official players in the Democratic presidential primary race, because polling badly means you don’t get to debate.

Candidates had until 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday to meet the Democratic National Committee’s qualification requirements: amassing 130,000 individual donors and receiving 2% support in at least four qualifying polls.

Even after two new polls were released Wednesday morning, only 10 candidates made the cut, meaning they can all fit on one stage under rules set by the DNC. Those candidates are:

— Julián Castro, the former housing secretary

— Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota

— Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas

— Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur

The debate will be held in Houston on Sept. 12 from 8 to 11 p.m. Eastern time and will be broadcast on ABC and Univision. The moderators will be George Stephanopoulos, David Muir, Linsey Davis and Jorge Ramos.

The candidates will have 1 minute and 15 seconds to answer questions, and 45 seconds for responses and rebuttals. There will be opening statements but no closing statements.

It was about twice as difficult to qualify for this debate as it was for the first two sets of debates, and exactly half as many candidates qualified.

The one-night format means the leading candidates will all share the stage for the first time. Because of the size of the previous debate fields, two of the highest-polling candidates, Biden and Warren, have yet to face each other directly.

But the format also means that, once again, 10 candidates will be jostling for speaking time — a situation that can lend itself more to sound bites than to in-depth, well, debate. For that reason, some observers had been hoping for two debate nights with five or six candidates apiece.

Several candidates who didn’t make the cut criticized the DNC’s requirements, saying the committee was unnecessarily narrowing the field with five months still to go before the Iowa caucuses.

Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, in an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday, said the debate would be “missing something” by not including him. Bullock, who often emphasizes that he is the only Democratic presidential candidate who has won a statewide race in a state that voted for President Donald Trump, said there would be no “rural voice” onstage.

In a letter sent Wednesday to Tom Perez, the DNC chairman, an adviser to Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado complained that the committee had “not provided information on how or why its unprecedented debate qualification requirements were set nor what the criteria will be for the eight future debates.”

The DNC is accepting polls from 16 organizations for the debate qualifications, and some highly regarded pollsters are not on the list. Several more candidates, including the billionaire investor Tom Steyer and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, might have qualified for the debate if more polls had been counted. But a larger list would not have helped Bennet or Bullock, because neither has met the donor requirement.

Some lesser-known candidates have criticized the donor requirement, too, arguing that it creates an incentive to focus on fundraising rather than voter outreach. It seems, though, that 130,000 donors was actually an easier bar to clear than 2% support in four polls.

Four candidates — Gabbard, Steyer, self-help author Marianne Williamson and Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, who ended his campaign last week — met the donor threshold but not the polling threshold. Nobody, by contrast, met the polling threshold without meeting the donor threshold.

Steyer got three of the four polls he needed, but failed to reach 2% support in either of the polls released Wednesday morning. Gabbard hit that mark in two polls, and Williamson in one.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who ended her campaign Wednesday, and former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, who also dropped out recently and is now running for Senate, were the only other candidates to reach 2% in a qualifying poll.

Steyer, Gabbard and others who didn’t make the cut for September could still qualify for the fourth debate, which will be held in October. They have until two weeks before that debate — whose date hasn’t been announced yet — to meet the current criteria. (After that, the DNC may raise the qualifications bar yet again.)

So don’t get too excited about the one-night format. The second night will probably be back a month later.

The September Democratic Debate Will Be One Night Only

After two rounds of back-to-back debate nights over the summer, the next Democratic presidential debate will be a one-night affair.

The Democratic National Committee has set stricter criteria for the third set of debates, which will be held Sept. 12 and 13 in Houston. If 10 or fewer candidates qualify, the debate will take place on only one night.

Candidates will need to have 130,000 unique donors and register at least 2% support in four polls. They have until Aug. 28 to reach those bench marks.

These criteria could easily halve the field: The first two sets of debates included 20 of the 24 candidates, but a New York Times analysis of polls and donor numbers shows that only 10 to 12 candidates are likely to make the third round.

Seven candidates have already met both qualification thresholds and are guaranteed a spot on stage. They are:

Three other candidates are very close: Former Housing Secretary Julián Castro and the entrepreneur Andrew Yang have surpassed 130,000 donations and each have three of the four qualifying polls they need, while Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has met the polling threshold and has about 120,000 donors.

Beyond them, only three candidates have even a single qualifying poll to their name: the impeachment activist Tom Steyer (two polls), Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii (one) and former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado (one).

We asked all three of their campaigns to provide donor numbers so we could assess where they stood. Gabbard had just under 114,000 donors as of Wednesday night. A spokesman for Steyer said he was “on track to collect the required number of donors to make the September debate stage,” but did not give a number. Hickenlooper’s campaign did not respond, but Politico reported a month ago that he had only 13,000 donors.

The other 11 candidates in the race have no qualifying polls to their name, and they all went into this week’s debates seeking a viral moment that would attract new donors and lift them, even briefly, in the polls.

The qualification rules do not require enduring support. Even a small post-debate surge could push a 1% candidate up to 2% in the small handful of polls he or she needs.

But for those who have not qualified, the Aug. 28 deadline is an existential threat. Candidates like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York or Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington could be washed out of the race if they don’t get momentum from this week’s debates. And if you’re wondering whether they’re anxious, the answer is yes.

Gabbard’s campaign calculated at one point that she needed a new donor every minute to reach 130,000 by the Aug. 28 deadline, so if you go to her website, a timer next to the donation button begins counting down 60 seconds. Then the text changes.

“Oh no!” it says. “The time expired and you didn’t donate!”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/us/politics/next-democratic-debate.html" id="edd95f6b-5dcf-3ff5-a757-c8044d05ed91">The New York Times</a>.

Only 7 Candidates Have Qualified for the Next Democratic Debate

So you made it through the second set of Democratic debates. Congratulations! Ready to talk about the next ones?

Neither did badly by any means. There was no doubt that Biden beat his lackluster performance from the first debate, and Harris held her own under a barrage of attacks, likely a product of her own strong showing last time.

But Wednesday’s most memorable performance, the experts seemed to agree, came from Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., although so many candidates scored at least some points that strategists questioned whether the polls would move much.

Here is a sampling of responses from some of the people who know the stakes of debates best: veteran campaign strategists and consultants from both parties.

Booker seized the spotlight

Booker went after Biden fiercely on criminal justice, hammering home Biden’s role in creating the policies he is now proposing to reverse. Biden, in turn, attacked Booker’s record as mayor of Newark, New Jersey, but the consensus among strategists was that Booker came out on top.

They also praised Booker’s argument, early in the debate, that the candidates should focus less on intraparty disagreements on health care and more on their actual opponent, President Donald Trump.

“Biden fired back on @CoryBooker about Newark policing under his mayoral Administration. But Booker was faster on the draw and came out ahead on style points.” — David Axelrod, former senior adviser to President Barack Obama

“Strong closing statement by @CoryBooker. He has a knack for weaving together family history with his values. Also, his shout-out to the host city (Detroit) didn’t come across as pandering.” — Laura Belin, Iowa political commentator

“Think it’s pretty clear @CoryBooker has best night. Made his own case — and did it well.” — Jennifer Palmieri, former spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton and Obama

Biden exceeded low expectations

There was little doubt Wednesday that Biden was more prepared and more polished than in the first debate, when he took a drubbing from Harris. He came armed with opposition research on her and Booker, and generally appeared more confident than last time.

His performance was uneven at times — and as several commentators noted, he was the only candidate to abruptly cut himself off, sometimes midsentence, when the moderators signaled he was out of time — but he easily cleared the low bar set by his last appearance.

“Excellent opening statement from @JoeBiden out of the gate. Rising above, focusing on Trump. General election attitude. It’s working.” — Adrienne Elrod, former senior adviser to Clinton

“@JoeBiden finally played the card he should have played in the last debate when @KamalaHarris challenged him on race. @BarackObama vetted his record and nominated him for Vice President.” — Axelrod

“Biden wobbling between strong moments — far better than Miami — and awkward stumbling.” — Mike Murphy, Republican consultant

“Castro’s hit on Biden was a tough hit. But this is a different Biden from the one we saw in the first debate. In Miami, he looked rattled. Not tonight. He’s taking the hits and pushing back.” — Mo Elleithee, former spokesman for Clinton and the Democratic National Committee

Harris was mostly on defense

Harris dominated the first debate from start to finish. That lifted her significantly in the polls, but it also meant that on Wednesday she was as much a target as Biden. Where she had been on offense, she now found herself on defense.

Still, while she did not shine as much as last time, she held her own.

“@KamalaHarris has been on defense all night. A stark difference from the first debate.” — Patti Solis Doyle, senior adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign

“@KamalaHarris is getting a lot of incoming and she’s handling it all well. I do not get what people are seeing who think she is flustered or unsteady. Bizarre to me.” — Palmieri

“@KamalaHarris’s closing is chilling. Usually these statements are formulaic. Hers is so powerful. Trump as a predator will ring true to many Democrats.” — Paul Begala, former adviser to Bill Clinton

Gillibrand divided the commentariat

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., may have had the most memorable line of the night, if not the most substantive: “The first thing that I’m going to do when I’m president,” she said, “is I’m going to Clorox the Oval Office.” She also brought the subjects of gender equality and sexual violence into a debate that had previously skirted them.

But on what she clearly hoped would be a defining moment — an attack on Biden for his opposition to an expanded child care credit in 1981 — the reviews were mixed. Some strategists loved it. But within the theater, the applause left little doubt that the audience was with Biden on this one.

“Strong case by @SenGillibrand on how she looks at impossible odds, with a good mix of her own accomplishments and the fight she’ll take to Trump.” — Christina Reynolds, spokeswoman for EMILY’s List

“I think @SenGillibrand is having a good night. Better than I expected: Not taking the bait to attack, staying on brand, elevating women in the policy conversations on healthcare and immigration.” — Emily Farris, political scientist at Texas Christian University

“Whoa. @JoeBiden calls out @SenGillibrand for accusing him of opposing women working outside the home. You can criticize Biden for a lot of things, but this attack smells crassly, political, and Joe unmasked it as such. The audience cheers.” — Begala

“This exchange w/ @SenGillibrand &amp; @joebiden on his previous words on women working outside the home shows how gendered issues will be a weakness. This could be scratching the surface for Biden, as we may see in the coming months if he maintains lead.” — Christian Grose, political scientist at the University of Southern California

Gabbard, Inslee and Yang scored a few points

While not at the top of the pack, several lower-polling candidates managed to break through the noise at least once. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, in particular, attacked Harris on her prosecutorial record in a way other candidates had chosen not to or been unable to do. Andrew Yang and Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington also had their moments.

“@TulsiGabbard brought up all the points against @KamalaHarris that Internet commenters having been pointing out for several months. … If @JoeBiden could deliver a takedown as effectively as @TulsiGabbard just did, he’d be the nominee already.” — Frank Luntz, Republican pollster and consultant

“So Gabbard is the one who finally had the real courage to come for Kamala on her criminal justice record. It was FIERCE. Been waiting for this... Kamala is leaning in to her record, and she’s FIERCER. Just saying. Powerful back and forth.” — Aisha Moodie-Mills, Democratic strategist

“Yang is having a very good debate. It’s not just that he’s gotten more comfortable. It’s also that he sounds different than the other candidates without sounding loopy. It’s the Williamson role, but played by an analytical AI obsessive.” — Ezra Klein, editor of Vox

“I also think @JayInslee has had a very good night. Not flashy, but earnest. And on climate change, quite strong.” — Axelrod

The bottom line

“Takeaways: Biden dramatically improved; Kamala and Booker had strong performances. Gillibrand and Bennett had some memorable moments but does it matter? My guess is 5 people @ most on tonight’s stage make it to third debate. Oddly last night felt more energetic.” — Elrod

“I don’t pretend to know which ones will get a bump, and how big the bumps are. I will say that not enough happened in this debate to dramatically shuffle the deck. Biden was battered for two hours but it reinforced his frontrunner status.” — Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/us/politics/who-won-night-2-of-the-democratic-debate-experts-weigh-in.html" id="060c79da-7bdf-3981-a060-8cd3a047d18c">The New York Times</a>.

Who Won Night 2 of the Democratic Debate? Experts Weigh In

Tuesday night’s debate belonged to the front-runners, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But their counterparts Wednesday, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., couldn’t quite replicate their dominance.

Rep. Pete Olson, first elected in 2008, announced Thursday that he would not seek a seventh term in his increasingly diverse district. Democrats had viewed the seat as one that could come open because it has been increasingly difficult for Republicans to defend.

Olson cited family reasons for stepping down at the end of this session, saying in a statement that his time in Congress had come “at great personal sacrifice to my family.” His statement added, “As someone who has long advocated for policies that put our families first, it’s time for me to take my own advice and be a more consistent presence to help our family.”

His office said he was not available for an interview Friday.

The district — Texas’ 22nd, in the southern suburbs of Houston — has been represented by a Republican for all but two of the past 40 years; former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay held it for two decades. But the 2018 election there was unusually close: Olson won by 5 percentage points, compared with 19 points in 2016. At the presidential level, the district went Republican by 8 points in 2016, down from 25 points four years earlier.

Olson’s last Democratic challenger, Sri Preston Kulkarni, is running again in 2020.

“Now is not the time to rest,” Kulkarni, a former diplomat, said in a statement Thursday. “Now is the time to fight harder than ever. It’s time to ensure that we have leadership in Congress that believes in affordable and high-quality medical care, higher wages for working families and a fair education system.”

He will face Nyanza Moore, a lawyer, in the Democratic primary, along with other possible challengers. On Twitter, Moore responded to the news of Olson’s retirement with a hashtag: “#TakeTheSeat.”

The district is something of a case study for the demographic changes happening in many parts of the country — changes that Democrats hope will open up new paths to victory for them. People of color, who tend to lean Democratic, represent a growing portion of the electorate in states like Texas that have long been reliably Republican, a trend that is especially apparent in Olson’s district.

Olson was one of three Republican members of Congress to announce their retirements this week.

Rep. Paul Mitchell of Michigan did so Wednesday, saying in a speech on the House floor: “My objective has always been simply to work to address significant challenges this nation faces: health care, immigration and infrastructure, for example. However, it appears to me that rhetoric overwhelms policy, and politics consumes much of the oxygen in this city.”

And Friday, Rep. Martha Roby of Alabama said that she, too, would leave at the end of her term. Despite voting with President Donald Trump most of the time for the past 2 1/2 years, she had suffered politically for criticizing him in 2016 in response to the Access Hollywood tape that showed him boasting about forcing himself on women.

Mitchell’s and Roby’s seats, both heavily Republican, are not likely to be competitive in 2020.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/us/politics/texas-house-diversity.html" id="18387b03-dc1e-3dc4-a263-773e50cb303f">The New York Times</a>.

A Texas Congressional Seat Just Got Very Competitive

The announcement that a Houston-area Republican congressman is retiring has set up what could be one of the most closely contested House races in the country and provided a glimpse of how much more competitive parts of Texas have become.

But at the Essence Festival in New Orleans on Saturday, she was not the only one with a plan.

Warren and Sen. Kamala Harris of California both used the occasion — the annual culture and music festival sponsored by Essence magazine, which caters to black women — to introduce major new proposals intended to address racial disparities, including in wealth and homeownership.

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas also spoke at the event.

Kamala Harris: $100 billion for homeownership

Harris announced a plan aimed at reducing the racial gap in homeownership, including $100 billion to help black families and individuals buy homes in historically redlined communities, where banks systematically denied them loans. The money would help cover down payments and closing costs for up to 4 million families or individuals, providing homebuyers with up to $25,000 each.

Harris also called for stronger laws against housing discrimination; for more funding for financial literacy education; and for major changes in the calculation of credit scores, which lenders use to determine interest rates and eligibility for loans.

Currently, credit scores are based on payment history for things like credit cards, auto loans and mortgages, which many people of color don’t have. Harris’ plan would require credit reporting agencies to include rent, phone bill and utility payments in their calculations as well.

Her campaign projected that eliminating the homeownership gap would increase the median wealth of black households by about $32,000, and that of Latino households by about $29,000. Warren, of Massachusetts, had announced a similar plan.

“Join me as we right what is wrong and write the next chapter of history in our country,” Harris said. “The fight of black women has always been fueled and grounded in faith and in the belief of what is possible.”

Harris also said that if elected, she would seek to require the Justice Department to review the constitutionality of any abortion law passed by a state “that has a history of interfering with a woman’s access to choice” — a process, known as preclearance. The Voting Rights Act required similar review for voting-related laws until the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling in 2013.

Warren: New Rules for Federal Contractors

Every year, the federal government awards $500 billion in contracts to companies that, altogether, employ about a quarter of the country’s workers. Warren’s plan, which she released Friday and described to the audience Saturday, calls for an executive order that would require the recipients of those contracts to diversify their workforces and pay women and people of color equally.

“It’s up to the federal government to say what the terms of those contracts are,” Warren said. “It’s not enough to talk the talk about equal pay for equal work. It’s not enough to talk the talk about the diversity of your workforce. You’ve got to walk the walk, or you’re not getting those federal contracts.”

Under her proposed executive order, contractors would be barred from asking about past salaries and criminal records and from using forced arbitration and noncompete clauses. Another component of the plan is meant to diversify the federal government’s own workforce.

Maggie Astor

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